As it is generally known, a hyper-converged infrastructure (“HCI”) is an information technology infrastructure framework that integrates storage and virtualization computing. In an HCI environment, storage and processing resources are provided together within individual HCI appliances. Specifically, each HCI appliance combines compute and non-volatile storage resources, together with memory and communication interfaces. Each HCI appliance includes a hypervisor or virtual machine monitor that may also be referred to as a virtualization platform, and that is referred to herein as a virtualization environment. One or more virtual machines are created by and run on the virtualization environment of each HCI appliance. The locality of directly attached storage resources with regard to virtual machines executing on the same HCI appliance can advantageously provide low latency for storage accesses. Multiple HCI appliances are often combined and managed together as a cluster of HCI appliances.
Under various circumstances, a copy must be made of a virtual machine located on one HCI appliance, and then brought up for execution on a different HCI appliance. One example of such circumstances is when new virtual machine copies are made from a primary virtual machine template (sometimes referred to as the “golden image” for a virtual machine), and then distributed across different HCI appliances within a cluster of HCI appliances for purposes of load balancing.